The Green Integer Blog supplements our Green Integer website with essays on various cultural topics by editor/publisher Douglas Messerli, along with a listing of Green Integer titles and information on our new books. Please note that all essays and commentary are copyrighted by the author, Douglas Messerli, and may not be republished without permission.

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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

"CNN: Barbarians at the Gates"

cnn: barbarians at the gate

PROLOGUE: In early April of 2014 Malaysian Airlines
flight 370 disappeared from sight, its planned flight shifting midway toward
its destination, while its communications ceased as it veered from its original
flight path. Having already gotten into the habit of listening daily to CNN
news reporting as a kind of background commentary, I began to write a kind of
impressionistic summary of their news reportage.

On April 22, 2014 I had surgery for a
right-knee replacement after suffering from severe arthritis in both knees for
several years. During the early days after surgery I was given opioid drugs for
pain, but soon after I left the hospital I insisted they give me much lower
dosage. And I presumed the pills that I was talking while undergoing home
therapy exercises to recover the usage of my knee and leg where nothing
dangerous—although I did perceive they were still adversely affecting me.

Throughout April and May of that year I
continued to suffer, asking again to have a yet milder dosage, while writing an
essay on my longer-than-expected suffering entitled “Pain”; yet throughout the
next month and a half I continued to improve, writing essays and accomplishing
numerous publishing tasks nearly every day, as has become my pattern.
Simultaneously, I continued to write on the Malaysian Airlines flight as
reported by CNN, using a kind of Beckettian strategy to talk about the
repetitious and often meaningless television reports.

Somewhat eerily, I posted these daily
writings for several weeks on Facebook, gaining a rather large following for my
strange postings.

I was startled, when I recently reread my
strange, hallucinatory CNN reports of the disappearance of Malaysian Airline
370 in April 2014, whose CNN coverage I began before that surgery on April 8th,
how those few days of using painkillers had influenced me, and I had reported
their effects. It is as if I were watching the news while experiencing an opium
high—which I can assure you was not the case. Obviously, the experiences I had
had with painkillers was still very much with me when I wrote the sometimes
very realistic, if satirical summaries of my daily encounters with CNN news
about a variety of tragedies.

Strangely, I cannot quite remember my
state of mind while I was writing this odd work—although. sometime later, in
June 17, when a Malaysian jet was shot down over the Ukraine skyways,
apparently by a Russian military attack, which killed all its passengers, I
continued to listen every day to CNN, as had become my habit, writing a long,
far more sober series of reports on and about the Russian-inspired battles
against Ukraine, continuing into August and the next few months of that year,
while also working on the many essays that would make up the first volume on
identity of My
Year 2015, including those about Gertrude
Stein.By this time I certainly felt
as if I had “come through” all the effects of my operation, and was moving on
to complete health.

I might have done an even more absurd
piece had I attended more carefully to the CNN reports of Republican and
Democratic politics I have experienced over the past couple of months of 2015
and 2016, which I now hear more as background babble than actual reports
(unfortunately, that is not quite true; their endless drivel has entered my
memory). I have determined that I shall soon turn off CNN permanently, but
given the absolute repeating absurdity of such reports, I hate to miss out in
all the material which might produce several such eccentric summaries.

CNN:
Today, weeks after the loss of Malaysian Airline 370, we still know nothing.
The question is do we know nothing because there is nothing to know, or because
nothing is what we are being told to know? Of course, there is the possibility
that nothing can be known since the Malaysians know something we do not know.
And it may be possible that we know more than we want to know about the nothing
about which we know? Today we will discuss these issues and others, reiterating
again and again, throughout the day, just how much we don't know, and how
impossible it is to know what we don't know, and can't know. The Chinese, we
can assure you are confusing us by pretending to know something that we presume
they do not know and refusing to tell us what they might know that we don't. But
that will not stop us, we assure you, in discussing all that we do not and
cannot know but might want to know if only we could! Stay tuned.

CNN:
Today we have stacked 10 Empire State Buildings upon the original Empire State
Building to determine where the ping, from which we believe it did not really
ring, would have had to come from upon the floor of the Indian ocean where it
might but probably did not come to sing. So imagine King Kong scaling 10 times
the original height from where he clung to be shot from, and you can imagine
the difficulty of hearing a ping, let alone anything, from that place where the
Chinese claimed it sung. We now need to "mow the lawn," to cut away
all that seaweed to read what we probably know isn't on the floor below the 10
Empire States below what we know with some certainty isn't really where we're
going to go.

CNN:
The ping has been lost, and we must imagine that it may be a problem of the
incorporation of our triangulations. The black box is orange. The silent sea is
a very noisy location. A boat is not a good place from which to hear anything
but the motor of the ship. Two angles do not a third make. We cannot recapture,
as Proust has proven, what may already be dead. And then there is the problem
of the density of the ocean floor, the salinity of its waters, and the
possibility that the voices of ocean life are simply imitating the sound we
seek. And then the trail of the sensor may be many miles away from the ship
that it tows in its wake. We may be hearing, in short, something miles or even
months away from what he hear when we heard what we thought we did. Or maybe we
didn’t really hear anything. That is certainly a possibility. The “pings” we
heard might have been a product of our imagination or, of course, a creation of
the very machine we have developed to hear what we want to hear. And then there
is always the question of who is hearing and interpreting what we want to hear
and where and when. For example, the special sequence to which we have been
listening is not precisely at the sequence we might have expected it to be,
with a 10% discrepancy. How to explain what we were listening for is not
precisely what we were expecting to hear or that we can no longer now hear
anything? We cannot put something into the ocean when we do not know and cannot
know if anything we might be seeking it is near.

CNN:
Breaking news: If you want to land on water you have to speed up the engine,
going tail down first, wheels up. Then you can gradually sink. Since we have
seen nothing on the surface we have to imagine that perhaps nothing is on the
surface but lying far below somewhere in the muck and primordial slime or maybe
an ocean canyon or a crevice. And then there is always the possibility of a
false positive. That is when you think you have found something you really have
not. It’s like a tuna you have on the line, but miles from the actual fish. So
you never can know for sure whether or not you have really caught the fish or
even that it’s actually a tuna and not just a single sardine. Think of it this
way, since we have no evidence of anything, the plane may not have really
fallen out of the sky or, if it did, it may have been swept away to another
continent in the various cyclones that Americans call hurricanes. It may well
be in India or even in Malaysia from where it originally left. Everything is so
uncertain in that part of the universe. So where do we go from here? Let us
assure you, we will keep you up to date.

CNN:
One person’s opinion is as good as another’s, until we know what we don’t know
and probably can’t. The problem is that everyone says something that no one
knows. And the difficulty with the whole issue is that no one truly knows just
what the issue is. Why did our
experienced pilot not fly where he was going, making a left turn instead of
staying straight, to move across the strait of Indonesia to “possibly” escape a
blip of radar which the Indonesians insist they could not have missed? It
didn’t appear on our screen, whatever it was or wasn’t, they admit. Why would
it have dipped down nearer the ground? Why would he veer? Only to rise again to
go down the side of Australia where anyone knows there’s nowhere to go, let
alone a place to land a plane? Perth is too far. Near there, some claim, Amelia
Earhart disappeared, never to be found. At least they’re in the right haystack,
but can they find a needle there? Or has the needle already sewed itself into
some other pattern, created a fabric where the events can no longer be traced?
And why, if they got down so low, did no one say so, did no one call home? We
now also know that the pilot said goodnight, which means his copilot was
apparently flying the plane when it turned from where it was going? You have to
comprehend, the ooze at the bottom of the ocean floor is maybe a mile down or
more. It’s like slicing a pizza: you can slice it very thin and find something
quite tasty or slice down thick and find absolutely nothing that is worth a
swallow. You have to comprehend; the Grand Canyon is not as deep as the 14,000
feet below which this little white canister (within the black box that’s
orange) is embedded. We believe it’s down there, but “where,” we have to ask is
“there?” You don’t know what you can’t.

CNN:
You have to understand, the water can bend sound and time itself as well. What
we thought we have heard may not have been what we heard because it might have
come from another location away from the place in which we have heard it or
even have been listening. For example, you may try to talk to someone but
imagine that the person you are talking to is miles and miles away, and what
you said was not said today but yesterday or the day before or the before that.
Or perhaps even tomorrow or a week down the road. So what you are being are
told is not what you think is being said. “I’m here” might really mean, “I’m
there,” or “over somewhere you might never have even imagined me to be.” Or
“I’m going to be here but will not be where you think I am when you get there.”
Under water is not the same as being on the land. Being on the land is not the
same as being on the seashore, and being on the surface of a large body of
water has nothing to do with being on the beach. Seagulls do not like ships.
There is a reason for this. The gulls depend upon people, these days, not what
the sea has to offer them. Some people think they’re what’s left of the angels,
these little mean birds, who depend so much on human waste. They too used to
soar, but now wait around to steal what they can from human beings.

So you can imagine, for example, if we
wanted to descend from 35,000 to 4,000 feet, the nose would go down, and the
warning signals would pierce the night air, the big jumbo jet roaring into
human space. You’d have to hear and see it as surely as the seagulls, and you’d
wonder at the sight. Some of the Indonesian islanders said they saw just such a
thing! But nobody believed them. How could they see the windows and the lights
of the plane at such a height?

CNN:
Today we must report that if the plane, had in fact gone down to 4,000 feet, it
would surely have hit mountains throughout Malaysia. A jet of that size could
probably not have descended that many feet as quickly as it was described as
having done. It probably was impossible to do so. Accordingly, we must question
whether the missing plane ever descended to that level or, in fact, ever
descended at all. It could, in fact, have risen even higher into the
stratosphere and, as some slightly insane speculators have suggested, gone
straight to heaven. Unlikely of course, given the reality of our earthly
conceptions, but since our earthly conceptions have absolutely no logic behind
our understanding of what might have occurred, we know that anything might be
possible. Search planes which we never knew before, sent out to check on the missing
plane, discovered nothing was there. The question, of course (off course
necessarily) was where they might have searched? New Zealand is now searching a
space the size of West Virginia—which is a very strange state in which one
might, metaphorically speaking, seek to search. Nobody has yet found any
“debris,” the definition of which is “broken scattered remains, rubbish.” New
Zealand confirms that they are checking the dots, although it is clear no dots
have even been spotted. But they are confident that if something were to appear
on the surface, they would surely recover it. If the theory isn’t accurate, CNN
confirmed, then we surely can’t understand who went up and who went down and
howso.

CNN:
Everybody is a suspect once again. Even though previously they said no one,
except perhaps the crew, might be guilty. So now, the Malaysians’ claim, it
might have been everyone. Me or even you. Well, probably not. You never know in
such an incident, who might have been involved or who might not. And that is the
point: you cannot cut anyone out! Each of us, in our inability to comprehend,
is committing a crime of sorts in not being able to. It is a conundrum, in
fact. There is possibly a problem of language, in translating different
customs, the Malaysians admit. Although they have the control of any black box
information, they cannot open those machines or actually read what they might
reveal to us. The Australians have far more confidence. They are certain that
those “black” boxes will be recovered, but others, equally certain, proclaim
that to search Massachusetts and Connecticut combined—the new metaphorical
space which we are now searching—it will take several days, weeks, months,
maybe even years. The batteries have probably died, unable to give us any more
information. So where do we look, if look is the proper metaphor of what we
might be doing? We must imagine being on the highest peak of the Rocky
Mountains and looking down to see a suitcase at the very bottom. If Mt. Rainer
were to be turned over facing into the ocean, this would be deeper yet. Think
of the highest building in Quatar and the Empire State, and…whatever else we to
imagine on top of that. All of this is deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. You see
what we mean—or perhaps, no one can see anything. In this case, surely, seeing
is not believing.

CNN:
A robot is now searching the bottom of the ocean. It takes two hours to dive to
the bottom. And the co-pilot forgot to turn his cell-phone off. Or maybe he
purposely turned it on. Was he trying to communicate with some of the
terrorists or trying to call for help? His cell phone reached, evidently, no
one. And no one else on the plane, evidently, had turned on their
cell-phones—certainly a very obedient bunch of passengers since we estimate
that, on most occasions, 35-40% do not remember to turn them off. Pilots
generally turn them off with great regularity. And the Chinese, we must admit,
are not as obedient as the Japanese. But this co-pilot did not turn off his
phone, and apparently the plane was low enough that his cell phone kept trying
to reach out for a cell tower with which to communicate. And this is the
break-down of all communications. That is very rare. Pilots are also very
obedient. What does it mean? It’s very, very strange, one cell-phone of the 239
people on board this silent plane. No calls were made before or after. Why
can’t everything just be transparent? Why are we so confused? What is going on?
It is certainly intriguing.

The robot who went down towards the
bottom of the sea, automatically returned before reaching its destination. It
knew that it was descending into depths in which it might not survive.

CNN:
Today they sent the robot back. It is also mapping, for the very first time,
the ocean floor—although nothing has yet been found. It is difficult to know
whether “nothing” has yet been found upon
the floor or the ocean floor has not itself been found. Things become
confusing when it is so very deep. Bluefin-21, as the robot is called, may not
ever be able to reach the floor itself—or may never want to go there. “Bluefin
is the best we have,” reported an authority.

They now must go back to the original
airport where Malaysian Airline 370 took off to see if some people actually
left their cell-phones on or, later, intentionally turned them on or, if not,
why they kept them off, intentionally or not. Were they all asleep? And if the
co-pilot left his cell-phone on why he might have even wanted to do that, or
forgot to turn it off? What does this say about his role as a responsible
representative of an airline, who asks people to please, turn off their
machines?

Bluefin, we must report, has just turned
broken down and surfaced once more, fearful clearly of the dark into which it
had been sent. The pressure is building. This is only to be expected. Robots
can only do what they are made to. An African elephant cannot stand on its toe
only.

China is now doing itself no good.
”Chinese efforts are hurting as much as helping,” says the New York Times. Recently they were blamed for not doing enough. The
Chinese are, understandably, a little confused about how to be involved in
something in which they are very much involved. The plane, after all, was on
its way to China with mostly Chinese individuals on board. That it never
reached where it was intended to go is a problem to those at the other end,
waiting to receive what never arrived there. The problem is, like everyone
else, the Chinese do not know how to find what they are seeking.

CNN:
The problem is we don’t know what is down there. Are there mountains? Deep
cracks in the earth? A lot of slimy debris? The Bluefin may be reaching the
limits of his endurance. Bluefin was very good in Boston Harbor, near the city
which again the other day demonstrated that it was a location of resilient
survivors. As we know, nothing bad happens until something bad happens.

Maybe a bigger vessel will be able to go
down for a longer time to search. But perhaps, once they go down there, they
will find nothing. That is certainly possible given the fact that they do not
yet know whether or not there is anything there to search. Poor little Bluefin
cannot know what it is searching for or whether it fact it can find it. It
simply sinks down as low as it can go to sound out the ocean floor.

The Mariners sending down Bluefin are
experienced. They are used to sending down their sonar sound machine and
waiting, inured to waiting and sending it down again and again. They are a very
patient folk. Everything spreads out in time, and they may see a lot of trash
down there because that is where everything ultimately descends. How will we
know whether we have found something or not? Even if we have found something,
it may be nothing. Or it may be something that we do not, given our search,
really care about finding, perhaps finding that debris might be telling us
something about what is on the ocean floor, even if we don’t want to know it is
there. Trash is not simply trash; it represents the destruction of the entire
ocean. A plane is not simply a plane but is a mysterious machine that has
vanished before our very eyes, or rather, our observation, which is what we
perceive as our eyes but which is really not.

People are feeling angry. The oil we found
on the surface on the ocean has nothing to do with the oil from a plane. The
cost of everything is immense.

CNN:
So far the Deepfin’s journey has been fruitless. There will come a time when we
shall have to regroup and reconsider says Malaysia. What that means, we can
only wonder. Will we need to look deeper or in other directions? Will we need
to go north? What if the plane never actually veered from its course and
actually landed in Beijing without anyone knowing. Are the passengers simply
hanging out on the streets, no longer wishing to return to their waiting
families? Rod Serling might have asked these same questions. But this is not
science fiction, this is simply a mystery which we have not yet been able to
solve. That is what is making it so frustrating. We are seeking the facts in a
world where they may no longer be any facts. It is far easier to imagine
something that is not true. If a tree falls in a forest has it really fallen?
If a robot goes to the bottom of the Indian Ocean has it really arrived to
where it was sent? Has it really seen anything, even if there is not a thing to
see? There is still no plane debris, although the ocean is filled with debris.
None of it is plain. Nothing is obvious. Nothing is all we have to embrace,
along with a lot of debris which is a something that we define as nothing.

Today, however, we have narrowed down the
search area for the Bluefin robot to a more specific and reduced space. Perhaps
that means that something might have been detected or that they believe that
the “pings” have sent them to a particular space. But it may be that “this is
not the place,” and then we have wonder what is a place, any place where we
might discover where the plane might have gone into the water, if it went into
the water and not straight to heaven as some believers might have imagined.
When a plane goes missing, the New York Police Department gets an immediate
call, which creates for them an “intelligence gap,” since everything is
related, these days, to everything. If you don’t know what lives in that “black
hole,” you have to imagine anything.

CNN:
“Everything is again being turned on its head.” The plane is not where we said
it was, so we are looking at the nearest point to where we previously said it
was even though we have no idea why we believe it was where we previously said
it might have been. This is a very large territory, and we have no machines
that can carefully scan this vast space, but nonetheless, we are changing our
minds to search out this new space where we also have no evidence of it
beingwhere the plane might actually
have crashed. Well, there was a ping nearby. You remember the pings? Those
things we may be hearing miles or even months away from what he hear when we
heard what we thought we did. That is what we are again nearing, the further of
these from where we started from. At least we are not going tomorrow where we
were going yesterday, but next week we do not where we will be going in
connection with now.

“Everyone stay where you are” commanded
the captain of the South Korean Ferry. Those who obeyed were the very first to
drown.

CNN:
An independent company has announced that they have spotted some large metal
scraps of aluminum, titanium, copper and other materials lying at the bottom of
the Bay of Bengal, far away from where everyone else is now looking. This is
something “new,” a commentator announces. This is something “out of the blue,”
responds another. I do not believe it says a guest commentator, but I don’t
know why. We have no reason either to believe it may be even near where we are
currently seeking, or that it couldn’t be much further to the north, although
it is unlikely that a jet which might have traveled as long as this one did to
get so close again to where it started from. But then we have never been told
why the Malaysians and Australians are convinced that in fact the jet did
actually travel for as long as it is said to have.

Imagine the center of the whole body
being contained at the center of the right knee. Feet and legs matter some, the
torso very little. The chest hardly matters in the least, but the arms are good
for steadying things and particularly for getting up. The head, as always, is
important, simply to warn you of mistakes you might make. The voyage of the
body must be an extremely balanced one, in which you walk forth on what is
described as a “walker,” but is actually a kind of metallic sliding machine
(made of aluminum, titanium, and plastic) in which you push your way through
space, picking it up and moving it when you need to make a sudden turn, which
in a small condominium is more often than you might think. It is also good for
moving the cat out the way. Or other old people if you are surrounded by them,
as I am not.

The conversations of the Malaysian crew
said nothing about knees or of using the machines in which they were ensconced
to push anyone or anything away from them. They were, evidently, simply and
calmly, seeking a way home through space.

CNN:
In some rooms, girls had gathered, a pattern among young teenagers, in groups
of 45 or more, their life-saving jackets already deployed. Had they been
suddenly told to go up to the surface from where they might have escaped, they
probably would not have been able to easily move from their impacted location.
Talking surely in fearful tones, occasionally giggling, holding hands, they
waited for the water to reach them. Did it come in a sudden rush or slowly
filling the room up?

Why are there no signs of debris, the
news commentators keeps asking, about the Malaysian airplane? Did the plane go
into the water in a sudden dive, taking it down deep before it had a
possibility of breaking up, or did the plane, entering the water along the line
of the ocean float for a while before it began to sink?

Each night, after I take my painkillers,
I too await, sometimes seeming to look into a kind of lens in the sky, for the
pain to disappear and sleep to arrive. Sometimes I feel as if I, for just a
while, were floating, before falling in place. Sometimes I see multi-spectral
images, blue tinged, representing the visions that may be awaiting me in sleep.
Sometimes I cannot meet the lens in the sky, and the pain does not stop
sufficiently for me to sink. I seem to stay awake for hours, although, from
time to time, I am startled by a snore and realize that I may have, at least
for a few seconds, sunken into absence.

If you miss the first connection with
unconsciousness, you must wait, sometimes up to 4 hours, at which point you can
take another one or two pills. But if you do not need it you do not want to
take the second pill in order to protect yourself from the effects of these
opiate-based substances. Some nights I feel as if my feet are being pushed
against some willful force, or that a hand is slowly raising my leg. Perhaps
this restrains me from falling to sleep. But sometimes it appears, also, to be
a pleasant sensation, combined with multi-spectral images, in gradual
apposition of gravity, a pushing against, an abandoning of.

Through their own multi-spectral
imaging, members of an Adelaide-based firm insist they have spotted a
construction in the cruciform of a plane made up of the metals I previously mentioned—mine
more like cinematographic stills. The only problem is that there is no way,
other authorities claim, for multi-spectral imaging to bounce back from such a
deep location in the ocean floor. Like the images I perceived, they probably
lie more within one’s head—even though they have what look to be photographs.
We certainly have no intention of abandoning the Southern arc, argue the
searchers of Malaysian Airline 370. There are still more than 100 bodies
missing on the sunken MV Sewol South Korean Ferry.

CNN:
The Head of the Malaysian Military Systems and Public Transportation, the same
man, cannot tell us how the two communication systems interlink. He will have
to “look into that,” he responds. One wonders, if he can’t tell us that
important piece of information, who might be able to? How to explain,
furthermore, why no one noticed that the Malaysian airplane went off the radar
until 17 minutes later, and that it took a further 4 hours before the
Malaysians attempted to do anything about it? By that time the plane, if the
coordinates we are now imagining are correct, it was storming down into the
Indian Ocean to disappear.

Like the girls upon the South Korean
ferry, the boys also gathered, some tentatively joking, ruff-housing around
with their friends, boasting that if they survived the event of what they might
post of their Facebook pages. Every once and a while, one or another would cry
out in despair. Again and again, the sputtering communications system would
spew out the advice to stay where they were. “We’re going down, if we stay
here,” one of them shouted out! But these were, alas, obedient boys, not truly
rebels. Their life-vests were not deployed. One posted his mother that he felt
that he might not survive much longer. Another grabbed the phone and made a
face. They quietly joked, now and then breaking down in sputters of terror.*

The ground is disappearing before our
feet! In Pensacola, Florida, entire roadways have been wiped away,
neighborhoods far from the ocean suddenly find themselves with sandy beaches on
their plots, the over-laying soil having washed into the bay. In Baltimore,
startled walkers observed parked cars along the river suddenly fall into the
water below as a huge sink-hole cracked through the neighborhood.

“Sometimes we can longer know what is up
and what is down,” simulators have shown us. To get to the surface you may have
turn in what appears to be the opposite direction. Two nights ago, I took a
pill and an angel came to show me how to unhook the lock that held the two
parts of a large cross together, pulling each of the two wooden planks apart in
order to allow my body to lie comfortably asleep between. Last night, I
attempted to resist the magic potion until, at the very last moment, the pain
became too intense, the lack of sleep irritating. Almost immediately another
kind of angel put my head to sleep, while gathering my other resources below
into effective forces. This might, obviously, be perceived as a kind of
metaphor for the restoral of my body, except that I had the definite feeling
that the new “forces” my angel was creating included planes and ships, perhaps
even vast forces of men preparing for war. She had put me to sleep only so that
she might take advantage of my inattention. I awoke disturbed for these
possible misuses of my bodily energies.

*These
imagined scenes were based on descriptions not from CNN but from The New York Times. CNN did show moments
from the students’ tape.

CNN:
The more we get to know Malaysia, the stranger that country seems to be.
Despite the fact that, as our commentator has suggested, the Adelaide,
Australian company’s claim to have found cruciform shapes in the Bay of Bengal,
it is fairly apparent that that company’s announcements are the next thing to a
hoax. Even they have backed off in speaking to authorities. Yet today the
Malaysia government ordered three ships to check out the vast Bay of Bengal in
search of any remnants of a Boeing 777-like Malaysian Airlines 370.

“The Russians are ridiculous.” Surely
there are certain languages, certain cultures where lying is an art, or at
least a condoned method of communication. Yes, we have all heard American
leaders, both political and military, lie directly to the American media and
the international community. One need only recall Henry Kissinger’s bald double
dealings in agreements between Viet Nam and the US. President Bush lied;
President Clinton lied; Obama has lied. Every country has liars, and uses them
to great advantage. But the Russians, throughout the Cold War, and now again as
their troops surround Ukraine, are the most determined lairs, so it seems, on
the planet, as Putin’s authorities warn the US not to interfere in what they
argue is merely a disagreement within
Ukrainian borders only. Everyone perceives that some Russian thugs, heavily
masked, are posing as Russian-supporting Ukrainians within that country. And
although the Russians claim that Westerners are leading ultranationalists, it
is quite apparent, that it is the Russians who are creating tensions within
Eastern Ukraine in order to justify any rush “to protect” the rights of
Soviet-leaning Ukrainians. The lie in these is these situations is so apparent
that it almost seems ludicrous when Putin spokesmen waddle on stage to warn the
US and Europe. It is clear bluster, reminding me of the time when a friend and
I attempted to get permission for our traveling group in Moscow to get food
service in the airport, since our flight had been delayed. The clerks refused to
even allow that they were there, pulling little hanging curtains over their
faces as if to pretend they did not really exist. “We can still see you!” we
shouted out, while they disappeared into thin air. Russia seems to be a country
in denial, unable to face its lost past or to find a place in a new world
order, the Russians seem to be in permanent exile within their own borders. How
do you sanction a country that does not admit its own actions, and in that,
denies, perhaps, that it truly exists? Or, as in the case of gays and lesbians,
would like to be able to deny their existence, as they did during the cold war.

And so, quite by accident I assure you,
we have returned to something that has seemed to exist but evidently does not
or, at least, cannot be recovered. When I first started taking my opiates, I
felt that all night was I being shown a series of plays, performances, films,
puppet shows, and even tableaux vivants
in order to tell me something. Sometimes the sets and costumes for these would
pop out from own body, as if I held, deep within the whole the repertoire for
these performances. And it was then I realized that the works I was watching
were not coming to me from an external source but from an inner, that the
stories I was being told were being told by myself. As quickly as I realized
that the stories, alas, stopped. My mind was forced to discern “other” exterior
forces, the “angels” I describe. Last night, after taking the first pain
killer, nothing happened. The pain remained, sleep eluded me. Within the 4-hour
sequence beginning at 10:00, I tried again, this time sleep gradually falling
over me. I realized that this in this instance, instead of leading me to sleep,
the “angel” had left little packages of information wrapped up within various
segments of my somnolence, like little playbooks or brochures on how to
continue the performances. But, in the end, of course, I could never read these
books, never actually perform the works they might have referred to if I could
have read them. The information meant nothing to me or anyone else. It did not
lead to any knowledge. Like the events occurring daily in the news, the
repetitions of events led to nothing but the inevitable search for more
information of how to uncover or alter what we might have perceived to be the
“truth.”

The Chinese have been asked to leave
Malaysia. The authorities there—the authorities anywhere—can no longer tell
them anything. The parents of those hundreds of children drowned on the South
Korean ferry are forced to return home without their boys and girls whether or
not their bodies have been found or not. In Nigeria, hundreds of young girls
have been kidnapped from their schools, many of them already, perhaps, sold
into Islamic marriages. The Barbarians are at the gate.

CNN:
“We are starting again at square one.” Scientists in search of Malaysian
Airlines 370 are now reconsidering all previous information before they begin
to search a vast space that will take more a year to search, and even then, that
search will not be definitive, and potentially can never end. It will cost over
60 million dollars. “There is still no sign of debris!”

NOTE:
Any discussion of the South Korean ferry has now slipped off our news reports.
Have the other bodies been discovered? Will the ferry be uplifted? When? Are
the parents still waiting along the shores? We have no news to report.

NOTE:
Although a small section of the Malaysian Airlines 370 airplane was later found
and identified as belonging to the airplane on the French island of Reunion, no
further evidence of the actual plane has ever been discovered, although from
time to time pieces of some unidentifiable plane parts do wash ashore in
Reunion and Mozambique. And, although CNN and other news companies report possible
sightings, nothing specific has further been identified. Stay tuned!

Los Angeles,
April 8-26, 2014, March 16, 2016. Posted daily during this period on Facebook.